Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1989, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a novelist. It was as a mother who enjoyed reading to her children that she discovered her passion for writing and she published her first children's book in her late 30s.

Six years later she wrote her first novel. She's now recognized as one of Britain's leading writers.

She's published eight novels. Two of them have been shortlisted for the book

a prize and one, Moon Tiger, won it in 1987. But she is no literary elitist. She also

writes short stories for popular magazines like Woman's Own Good Housekeeping and

Cosmopolitan. She is Penelope lively. The demand then

for women's magazine stories is as great as ever is it Penelope?

It is but the interesting thing is that it's a different kind of demand.

Nowadays, magazines like this cosmopolitan or Good Housekeeping,

publishing what are called literary stories, which I don't think they would have done 15 years or so ago.

Then the idea was that women any wanted to read romantic fiction and patently it isn't true.

But of course short story writing is an art in itself isn't it?

There are many novelists who simply can't do it.

That's absolutely true. It's different. It's a way of using an idea. It's a way of doing something

that presents, I think, a sort of flash of life rather than the great

exploratory business which is a novel. I love doing it but again it's it's a

frustrating process because you can't just go out and find the short story.

They either arrive or they don't.

The working at the process is completely different from working as a novel.

Have you ever written a short story about loneliness or life on a desert island?

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